The Lost Sisterhood Read Free

wine. “I have it from an excellent source that there was nothing wrong with your talk today.”
    I looked at him hopefully. By common agreement James was an academic superstar, and his publication list alone made most of his peers look like small moons locked in dying orbits. “Then why didn’t anyone
say
anything—?”
    “Such as?” James dug into his starter with relish. “You assault them with perspiring warrior women in furry boots and chain-link bikinis. They’re academics, for God’s sake. Be happy there were no coronaries.”
    I laughed into my napkin. “I should have made it a slide show. Might have finally gotten rid of Professor Vandenbosch—”
    “Morg—” James looked at me with those eyes. The eyes that told me I was seeing only the tip of his thoughts. “You know Professor Vandenbosch is four hundred years old. He was here long before we came, and he will be here long after you and I have gone to the happy punting grounds. Stop pulling his whiskers.”
    “Oh, come on!”
    “I’m serious.” Once again, James’s hazel gaze cut right through our merry banter. “You’re extremely talented, Morg. I mean it. But you need more than talent to succeed around here.” He smiled, perhaps to soften his criticism. “Take it from a seasoned chef: You can’t boil soup on the old Amazon bones forever.” With that, he raised his wineglass in a conspiratorial toast, but he might as well have tossed its contents into my face.
    “Right.” I looked down to hide my anguish. The words were not new to me, but coming from him they cut straight to my heart. “I understand.”
    “Good.” James swirled the wine a few times before drinking. “Too young,” was his final verdict, as he lowered the glass. “Not enough complexity. What a bloody waste.”
    James and I had been born practically within an apple’s throw of each other, but in two completely separate worlds. All we mortals ever saw of the Moselane family were expensive cars with tinted windows going far too fast through our quiet village and pausing for a few seconds while the automated gate to their infinity driveway swung open.That and, occasionally, through the bramble thicket encircling this private Eden, a glimpse of faraway people playing croquet or lawn tennis in the manor park, their laughter carried by the breeze like empty caramel wrapping.
    Although everyone in town knew the names and ages of Lord and Lady Moselane’s children, they were as removed from us as characters in a book. Because they were all in boarding school—the best, of course, in the country—young master James and his sisters were never around during the academic year, and almost all their holidays were apparently spent with school friends in remote castles in Scotland.
    Little more than an orb of auburn hair in the front pew at the annual Christmas service, Lord Moselane’s son and heir had nevertheless lived a perfectly full-fledged life in my daydreams. Whenever I was out for a Sunday walk with my parents—and, for a while, my grandmother, too—I would skip ahead through the forest hoping to encounter him on horseback, his imagined cape fluttering nobly in the breeze … even though I knew very well he was away at Eton, and later Oxford, and that there was no one around but me and my frivolous ideas.
    But I was not entirely alone in this imaginary world of mine. For as long as I could remember, my mother had been pining to become intimate with the Moselanes, who were, after all, our neighbors. By her calculations, the fact that my father had held the post as headmaster of the local school ought to have placed us in high esteem and thus made us visible even from the manor on the hill. But after spending most of her married life waiting in vain for a dinner invitation with that embossed crest at the top, she was eventually forced to acknowledge that our lord and lady lived by quite a different social abacus than she did.
    It was always a mystery to me why my